3 charts for you today:
Israel has now administered a COVID-19 vaccine dose to almost 70% of its population, approaching the 75-90% level that many experts believe could offer herd immunity to a population.
Although still nowhere near Israel's rate, the US and UK also make it into the top 5 countries for vaccinations, with the UK having administered a vaccine dose to 19% of its population, and the US having done 13%.
How long to get to "fully vaccinated"?
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the necessary number is ~80% of a population. At the current pace the UK will reach that milestone in about 16 weeks — which is roughly the end of May. At the US' current speed, it will take around another 22 weeks to get to that level, which would be sometime in mid-July.
There are obviously many caveats to those possible timelines, probably most notably the risk of disruption or delay to the vaccine supply chain — which is exactly what has been happening across Europe — but they should be useful as a rough guide. It's also important to note that many of these vaccines being administered need a second dose to be fully effective, which will likely slow the progress.
Nevertheless, assuming these timelines are even remotely accurate, they raise an important question. If the UK, US and other more-developed nations do manage to vaccinate their populations during 2021, to what extent will they turn their attention and resource to helping less developed countries do the same?
For the full vaccination data by country check our Our World In Data.
The market capitalization of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that was created as a joke, is currently higher than that of The Gap and Under Armour (data from Koyfin). In total, the sum of all Dogecoin in existence is worth a little more than $10bn. And you thought the GameStop story was crazy.
Musk makes noise
Of course Elon is involved. The Tesla CEO has been tweeting about Dogecoin for almost 2 years, first sharing a satirical article on Dogecoin back in 2019. Since then he has tweeted intermittently about the cryptocurrency — but it was his more recent tweets, almost always in the format of memes, that have sent the total value of Dogecoin above $10bn as retail traders continue to latch onto the next "big thing" that they can speculate on.
While the Dogecoin stuff may be a joke, Musk has been busy actually buying Bitcoin — the most mainstream cryptocurrency. In an SEC filing yesterday Tesla revealed that they had bought~$1.5bn of Bitcoin, and that they anticipate accepting it as payment in the future. That announcement sent Bitcoin to an all-time high of $47,000.
PS: A month ago we charted the cryptocurrency landscape, check it out if you missed it.
2020 was a bad year for many news organisations — particularly local print newspapers that had to contest with all the restrictions of COVID, on top of the existential threat of social media, where more than half of us now reportedly get our news.
The only organisations that seemed to thrive in that environment were the big ones. Indeed, the biggest of them all, The New York Times, had a very good year. The NYT added more than 2.3 million digital-only subscribers — taking the company's total subscriptions to more than 7.5 million. 2020 was also the first year that the NYTimes made more revenue from digital subscriptions than print for the first time in its history.
Slow and steady wins the race
For the NYTimes the transition to digital has been slow, but nonetheless impressive. The journey technically began 25 years ago when the company launched the nytimes.com website. Since then there have really been two transitions happening at the same time. One is from advertising to subscription, and the other has been from print to digital.
The "not-news" bit
The small blue-green bar at the top of this chart is particularly interesting. It represents the NYTimes revenue from digital products that aren't news — think games, cooking and audio. That segment has grown particularly quickly; $9m of revenue in 2016 turned into $14m, then $22m then $34m and finally $54m last year. If that division was a hot Silicon Valley start-up it would probably be thinking about an IPO soon.
1) A 116-year-old French nun is now believed to be the oldest person to have survived COVID-19. Sister Andre reportedly didn't even "realise she had it" and is looking forward to her 117th birthday — which is tomorrow.
2)Reddit, the social media platform at the heart of the GameStop story, has cashed in on its recent publicity, raising $250m at a $6bn valuation.
3)Twitter has reported some impressive numbers in its latest earnings report. Twitter's userbase was up 26% and ad revenue was up 31%.
4) Women's labor force participation rate hit a 33-year low in January according to analysis of the latest US jobs report, with 2.3 million women having left the workforce since February 2020.
5) If anyone is arguing with you over whether Tom Brady is the best of all time, this FiveThirtyEight article has all the stats you'll ever need.
6) Wikipedia employees are stumped as to why a picture of a purple flower has been getting 78 million hits per day since last June for no apparent reason.
